This article briefly examines the close resemblance of ‘The Secret Team’ to the Doug Coe “Family” Christian millennial cult, sponsors of the USA’s ‘National Prayer Breakfast.’ We begin with a look at ‘The Secret Team.’

Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty was one of the top Pentagon liaison officers for CIA special operations during the Vietnam war era. A highly ethical and intelligent man, Prouty more than came to have grave doubts about the endeavors he was involved in. He studied what was happening in his line of work closely and subsequently revealed what he had seen. He was, and is, no doubt the most important whistle-blower of the post World War Two era; arguably his revelations have been the most suppressed of any whistle-blower.

Here, I have taken a few key paragraphs from his seminal work, ‘The Secret Team’, to demonstrate what he had written about is as relevant today as when written nearly 45 years ago.

Prouty’s paragraphs are in italics, my clarifications and other observations are NOT in italics and are bracketed [ ]

*

It was the CIA, with help from a few other agencies, that put together the Inter-American Police Academy during the early Kennedy years, which played such an important part in emphasizing national police power in the nations of Latin America. The CIA brought in police instructors from all over the United States and from the military for this school. The success of this school, operating covertly from an Army base in the Canal of Panama, led to other schools in the United States that have carried on this type of work for police forces in this country. Part of the impetus behind the great buildup in the strength of police force all over the country dates back to this CIA police academy work and to the other schools it spawned. This police work not only involved training but it integrated new weapons, new procedures, and new techniques into American police work, some of which has been good and much of which has been quite ominous.

Anyone who doubts that this nation building and police activity has not become real and very effective right here in the United States need only visit the area around Fort Bragg to find one of these early paramilitary CIA-oriented specialists, General Tolson, sending his American soldiers out into the countryside with nation-building programs for the citizens of the United States. If such tactics continue, it is possible that an enlargement of such a program could lead to a pacification program of areas of the United States, such as the CIA and the U.S. Army have carried out in Indochina

*

By the end of 1962 this nation had gone so far down the line following the Agency, the new Special Forces doctrine, the MAP [Military Assistance Plan, for civilian government], and the new U.S. philosophy as outlined in the President’s Committee report, that it was saying openly it was well on its way to carrying out as top national policy a major clandestine operation so big in fact that the entire government would be involved. Obviously, it could not be really clandestine in the sense that it would be kept secret from our enemies; on the contrary, it was a new kind of “clandestine”, so it would be kept secret from all Americans

*

The important thing to understand is that the [Pentagon’s] much-heralded office of SACSA [Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities] had very few military responsibilities. It was almost entirely CIA oriented. Most of its dealings with the services were in areas in which the CIA was most active. For example, the great proportion of its dealing with the Army was strictly limited to Special Forces activity. With the Air Force it was for the most part limited to Special Air Warfare activity, and with the Navy it was active in the Sea, Air, Land (SEAL) teams. There were other duties of course; but most of them gave the office something it could say it was doing while it performed its primary task of supporting the CIA, the ST [Secret Team], and of breathing life into the massive Frankenstein called counterinsurgency

*

All the pieces were coming together, and during this formative period a new special group was formed. This was the Special Group (of the NSC) [National Security Council], Counterinsurgency, better known as the Special Group CI, or CI. This group presided over the CIA, State and Defense Departments, and others, who hastily put together a host of counterinsurgency nations. It was a watch list, which varied from time to time as intelligence inputs rose and fell with the tides of international events. The Special Group CI list usually ran to about sixteen or seventeen countries, in the order of how deep they were along the path to insurgency and decay. It is worth noting that although the automatic target of CI was Communism, not a single “Communist” country, including Cuba, was on the list. It was characteristic of the new ST focus that the United States was to intervene in the affairs of its friends and not in the affairs of Russia’s friends or of China’s friends [this list is about 130 countries today]

*

As countries were added to the list their military aid programs were hastily escalated, and literally hundreds and sometimes thousands of American military personnel of all types descended upon them. Sometimes they arrived in uniform and sometimes in civilian disguise. They went to work immediately in support of the new political-social-economic doctrine, and before long new schools were being built — by the army; new hospitals were being built — by the army; new farming techniques were under way — by the army; irrigation and water purification projects were under way, — again by the army. Underlying all of the paramilitary and sometimes real military work was the CIA, working with the host government to weed out, to identify, and to categorize all of the subversive insurgents. In countries where the word Communism had never been applied to bandits, beggars, and rebels before, all of a sudden all opposition was given the name “Communist”. All the problems were attributed to Communists, and the counterinsurgency action was under way [in today’s world, one sees a greatly enhanced version of this phenomenon, inclusive of World Bank, IMF and related USAID programs, as well as less ‘benign’ or overtly militarized involving the western powers armed forces in circumstance where the term ‘terrorist’ supplants ‘communist’, excepting those cases where the actual terrorists are given cover, for instance the ‘moderate opposition’ in Syria because they serve a means to an end; such as the overthrow of Assad. In less overt circumstance, the example could be Ethiopia where the USA has a low key counter-insugency presence and the Ethiopian military has been forcibly relocating populations to turn fertile farming land over to World Bank associated programs where the actual beneficiaries are western corporations. These dislocated communities risk becoming radicalized and new insurgencies born. In the case of Ethiopia, the counter-insurgency program is already in place, essentially a USA funded police directorate protecting the affluent western stockholder’s bottom line. If, or more likely, when, an Ethiopian insurgency develops, because Ethiopia is a Christian nation, the insurgency will be characterized along the lines of ‘The Lord’s Resistance Army’ or Joseph Kony]

*

For all its fabrication and apparent unreality, especially in this open society, the ST machine does have a central soul or brain… or perhaps… holy spirit. It is the evidence of a form of new religion. It has its secrets. It has its divine and unquestioned rights and obligations. It has self-righteous power over life and death. It does not believe in anything. It does not value anything. It is utterly ruthless [this preceding precisely describes today’s Doug Coe “Family” cult, the sponsor of the National Prayer Breakfast, featuring a membership entirely made up of Christian ‘millennial’ personalities of which many populate the apex of American corporate boardrooms and government institutions; including numerous congressmen, senators and serving generals throughout the USA military structures. ] Its greatest motivating force and drive is entirely undefined, because it moves by pressure. It reacts. It is therefore blind, meaningless, senseless. It will do anything in the name of anti-Communism. Yet in its greatest anti-Communist war it sees no inconsistency in the killing of one of its most anti-Communist creations — Ngo Dinh Diem. In its zeal to rid the Caribbean of Communism, it leaps at the chance to rid the Dominican Republic of Latin America’s strongest non-Communist, Rafael Trujillo. Any person or groups that know how to get to this infrastructure, who have the clearances, who have the need-to-know, can make an input into this ST, and as long as the desired action is anti-Communist, the system will operate [if today you substitute ‘terrorist’ for communist, you see essentially the same behaviors and inconsistencies. Saddam, Gaddafi and Assad all kept a clampdown on al-Qaida until the the USA intervened and Islamic State was born]

The idea “The Secret Team” in fact so closely matches the Doug Coe “Family” cult, they must be identified as one and the same, is not far fetched at all:

“One needn’t be a Marxist to find fault with the Family’s mash-up of New Testament and unfettered capitalism — Adam Smith himself would have recognized that theology as a disingenuous form of self-interest by proxy. Such interests have led the Family into some strange alliances over the years. Seduced by the Indonesian dictator Suharto’s militant anti-communism, they described the murder of hundreds of thousands that brought him to power as a “spiritual revolution,” and sent delegations of congressmen and oil executives to pray to Jesus with the Muslim leader. In Africa, they anointed the Somali killer Siad Barre as God’s man and sent Sen. Grassley and a defense contractor as emissaries. Barre described himself as a “Koranic Marxist,” but he agreed to pray to Grassley’s American Christ in return for American military aid, which he then used to wreak a biblical terror on his nation. It has not yet recovered. More recently, the Family has paid for congressional Christian junkets to bastions of democracy such as Serbia, Sudan, Belarus, Albania, Macedonia and Musharraf’s Pakistan…

“Counseling Rep. Tiahrt, Doug Coe offered Pol Pot and Osama bin Laden as men whose commitment to their causes is to be emulated. Preaching on the meaning of Christ’s words, he says, “You know Jesus said ‘You got to put Him before mother-father-brother sister? Hitler, Lenin, Mao, that’s what they taught the kids. Mao even had the kids killing their own mother and father. But it wasn’t murder. It was for building the new nation. The new kingdom” -from investigative journalist Jeff Sharlet’s “C Street”

*

They insist they are just a group of friends, yet they funnel millions of dollars through tax-free corporations. They claim to disdain politics, but congressmen of both parties describe them as the most influential religious organization in Washington. They say they are not Christians, but simply believers.

Behind the scenes at every National Prayer Breakfast since 1953 has been the Family, an elite network dedicated to a religion of power for the powerful. Their goal is “Jesus plus nothing.” Their method is backroom diplomacy. The Family is the startling story of how their faith—part free-market fundamentalism, part imperial ambition—has come to be interwoven with the affairs of nations around the world -Jeff Sharlet’s “The Family”